I won't let that happen to me."ĭetermined to survive and succeed, Jay Jenkins took whatever opportunities came his way, legitimate or not. It happens a lot where I'm from people get killed, people go to jail, and people forget about them. I don't wanna be dead or in jail without nothing. Young Jeezy described the roots of his ambition in an interview with Nooreen Kara on the British Web site The Situation, "I don't want to be a statistic. There he lived in the rough Fourth Ward area of town, where he quickly learned how hard life could be for a poor African-American youth. Jenkins was raised by his mother and grandmother in Macon and moved to Atlanta as a teenager. His parents were not married, and his mother soon took her baby son back to her home in Macon, Georgia. Jay Jenkins was born on October 12, 1977, in Columbia, South Carolina. I'm trying to restore some of the morals back into the game, as far as the street." Grew Up in Southern Ghetto I do music for…the kids who ain't got no sense of direction. As he says on the Web site of his record label, Def Jam, "I don't just do music for the clubs, I do music for the struggle. As someone who knows the hopeless life of the streets, he hopes to motivate young men like himself with a message of hope and honesty. However, Jeezy sees himself as a teacher as well as an entertainer. Young Jeezy's authentic experience on the streets endears him to his fans, but not to critics of rap and hip-hop culture, who condemn the references to drugs and guns in many of his lyrics. In 2001 he released his first album under the rap name "Lil' J," and by 2003 he had become Young Jeezy, one of the most popular rappers first in Atlanta, then throughout the South, and finally across the United States. Jenkins eventually entered the music industry as a producer, but he did not stay behind the scenes for long. He was drawn to rap music because hip-hop artists and their songs appeared to be the only cultural medium telling the truth about the lives of young people of color in the inner city. Starting out in such enterprises as selling illegal cell phones in alleys, Jenkins had a driving ambition to escape the dead-end life that seemed inevitable for some inner-city youth. Raised in poverty by a single mother, young Jay Jenkins learned to make money and earn respect in the few, mostly unlawful, arenas open to him on the streets of his Atlanta neighborhood.
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